UM students win a best paper award at International Symposium on Thermal-Fluid Engineering 澳大學生奪國際研討會最佳論文獎

UM students win a best paper award at International Symposium on Thermal-Fluid Engineering

Mr. Jiahang Chen, a doctoral student, and Ms. Kaiwen Wu, a master student, from the Department of Electromechanical Engineering (EME), Faculty of Science and Technology (FST), University of Macau (UM), has won the best paper award at the 4th International Symposium on Thermal-Fluid Dynamics (ISTFD 2023), which was hosted by Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA).

ISTFD is one of the leading annual international forums on Thermal-Fluid Dynamics, which aims to advance scientific knowledge and technology development of Thermal-Fluid Dynamics and relevant emerging, cutting-edge and interdisciplinary subjects. The symposium attracted a total of 156 papers from different universities and state key laboratories from all over the world.

In the symposium, Ms. Kaiwen Wu represented the research group to present a paper titled “Experimental Investigation of Pressure Drop and Heat Transfer Characteristics for Horizontal Flow Using Traditional and 3D-Printed Mini Tubes”. The research project was supervised by Prof. Lam Mou Tam, Professor of Department of EME, and was jointly sponsored by the Science and Technology Development Fund of Macau, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the Institute for the Development and Quality, Macau. As an advanced manufacturing technology, Selective Laser Melting (SLM) 3D printing technique, which was one of the additive manufacturing methods, could be used to print sophisticated and small-sized heat exchangers with large heat transfer areas so it has attracted high attention in the thermal engineering community in recent years. Due to the difference in the metal surface characteristics between 3D-printed tubes and traditional tubes, the research team experimentally compared the pressure drop and heat transfer characteristics inside a 3D-printed stainless-steel tube and a traditional cold-rolled stainless-steel tube under isothermal and non-isothermal boundary conditions. The results showed that the friction factors and heat transfer of the 3D-printed tube were different from the traditional cold rolled tube in terms of data trend and magnitude, especially in the upper transition and turbulent regions. Therefore, the new correlations in the upper transition and turbulent regions were developed to predict the friction factors and heat transfer coefficients of the 3D-printed tube for the application in the thermal systems. The efforts and achievements of the research team were fully recognized by experts at the symposium.